Cute Solution!

Hello friends and Merry-Almost Christmas!!!! This whole month has just flown by, but I feel like I always say that so I’m not sure why I’m surprised lol!

I think I’m almost ready for it, I have 2 projects I need to sew but I can only do it when Ella is sleeping so if you’re reading this Monday morning, hopefully I’m sewing right then lol! She loves to sleep in so I should have a few hours to get them done! I’m also going to make homemade buns and cinnamon rolls so that will be Monday’s afternoon job!

Our big family celebration is Christmas Eve when my son and his girlfriend, Josh and Brynn, come to our house and we have an evening of games, food and bevvies! They will leave Christmas day around noon hour to go to her parents house and then it’s just the 3 of us, which was so strange in the beginning but I think I’m embracing it now as our “new normal”, and who knows it will be before it changes again!

Last year I made the usual big turkey dinner on Christmas day for the 3 of us and that also seemed weird but boy, oh boy, did we ever have the luxury of feasting on leftovers for days lol! This year I’ve decided to make it Christmas Eve so Josh and Brynn can eat with us and then once we’re done that, we’ll work off the dinner by playing some games that I have planned!

As you know, our oldest son lives in BC so that’s usually my first priority, to get all his Christmas gifts gathered so I can mail it off so it arrives in time for Christmas! This includes his Secret Santa gift, if it is something that needs to be physically mailed, and some necessities for his stocking, which of course, includes chocolate……but have any of you seen the price of chocolates lately?!? We were actually gob smacked at the prices of the boxes of Turtles and Toffifee that we normally buy!

I remember hearing about that being a problem at Halloween time but I guess I naively hoped it would be better come Christmas time…..definitely naive of me lol! Jeff and I actually talked about not even doing chocolates this year, or maybe just doing something else, but what? We kind of just left it undecided for awhile until one day Jeff messaged me from Costco and had found some goodies there…..but I did say Costco so you know what that means, right lol?!? Costco sized = HUGE lol!

Thankfully they were actually priced quite reasonably but now I had another problem…..they weighed quite a lot so that was going to add a lot of weight to the box I’m sending to him which of course means that shipping fee is going to be even higher than normal! What to do, what….to….do?!?

I’ve got it…..I’ll make smaller reusable bags and fill them up so they still get treats, just not a crazy huge bucket of them! Off to the fabric stash where I found some Christmasy fabric and I was off! I really didn’t have a particular size in mind that I needed so I kind of just left my fabric be the deciding factor! I needed 2 bags so I squared up the fabric I had and cut it in half, which gave me 2 pieces that were approximately 18″ tall by 6″ wide.

At this point, I remembered that I had previously used a pattern to make pretty much the exact same thing I was doing now, and that was the DIY Drawstring Hot Cocoa Bags by Sew Can She. It’s a super simple project but I read through it quickly, just giving my brain a quick little refresher course on how to do the drawstring part! Within a very short time, I was done and was very pleased with the outcome!

See….cute and effective! I squeezed quite a lot of treats in there so I hope they’ll love the little surprise they get when they open them!

You know what else is great about these bags? You could literally make them any size you like so they could be a great replacement to single-use wrapping paper!!! I realize this as I’ve already got all our presents wrapped but this needs to be something I do in the future!!!

Well my friends, I must head off, I just thought of something else I should be doing that was on my list, a Cricut project that I’m assuming will be quite time-consuming but definitely fun too!

Farewell for now and Merry Christmas to you all! I’m wishing you a lovely holiday however you spend it!

Shawna